I would have posted this sooner (and got permission to do so now), but I've been very busy for the past two weeks.

Did you know that a lot of the game is stored in plain text, and you can edit it freely? It blew my mind when I found out. You can nerf Korea, Buff Elephants, change the number of civs on Huge to 22 or even modify the map generator scripts. Here are my changes:

\GameInfo\CIV5Worlds: General increase in playercount.
I play with fewer City States than normal. Another player helps fill out the map.

\GameInfo\CIV5Policies: Tradition opener Culture 3->2.
Tradition was too much "low risk high reward" for me, and I wanted a minimalistic change. Since of the four starting trees, Tradition generates the most culture early on, I decided to nerf that.